Brotherliness

Melvin Edwards reflects on fifty years of friendship with Jack Whitten Edited and condensed from a conversation with Zoé Whitley, January 16, 2019

Vanguard sculptor Melvin Edwards maintained a longstanding friendship and fraternal professional bond with Jack Whitten. Born in 1937 in Houston, Texas, Edwards, like Whitten, came of age in the segregated South. Edwards studied and sculpture at the University of Southern California, relocating to in 1967 to further his artistic practice. The artist lives and works in New York and Senegal. Edwards’s formal interests in the jagged linearity of barbed wire and the weighty materiality of welded steel transformed the language of minimalist sculpture through allusion to the histories of African American and African peoples. Working with steel, his works issue a strong spatial command, for instance in his ongoing series Lynch Fragments, which are hung at the artist’s eye level.

Edwards shared with Whitten a deep interest in the principles of jazz improvisation as well as of West African sculptural and weaving traditions. Edwards and Whitten exhibited together in a number of landmark exhibitions including New Voices: 15 New York Artists (1968); X to the 4th Power at the and 5+1 (both 1969) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 1970, Edwards became the first African American sculptor to receive a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2015, Edwards was the subject of a major retrospective, Melvin Edwards: Five Decades, at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas in the artist’s home state of Texas.

Zoé Whitley: The publication of Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed edited by Katy Siegel afforded readers like me an opportunity to better understand the artist’s perspective throughout his lifetime, in his own words—particularly early in his career. But you were there with him. Let’s start with the point at which you and Jack first came to know one another.

Melvin Edwards: Most people know me as a sculptor but I trained as a painter. I saw Jack’s and I just understood where he was coming from. We both had so much confidence in each other. We probably understood more and talked less if you know what I mean?

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Jack and I met in 1968. We were both in an exhibition. I’d just moved to New York in ‘67 from L.A. There was an exhibition at the Pan Am Gallery [American Greetings Gallery, Pan Am Building], which doesn’t exist any more. Romare [Bearden], Bill Majors, Norman [Lewis], Jack... we were all exhibiting.

ZW: New Voices: 15 New York Artists (also known as New Voices: 15 Black Artists) was organized under the auspices of Ruder & Finn Fine Arts and the Studio Museum in Harlem, March 12—31, 1968.

ME: I was new to New York at the time. Bill Majors’s studio is where I met most of those people. But Jack and I hadn’t met until the opening of the exhibition. We hit it off right away. By that spring of ‘68, I was going through a divorce. But by the time Jack and Mary got married that autumn, I was his best man! We were always in touch.

ZW: Not long after, in 1969, Jack and Mary started going to Crete.

ME: He invited me every year to come to Crete. I was always running off to Africa or Mexico. I always said I was going to go but I never made it. I’ll probably go now to pay my respects.

ZW: Did Jack ever visit you in Senegal?

ME: Jack went to Senegal once when I wasn’t there. [Fellow artist] Souleymane Keita (1947- 2014) showed him around my place. Jack also went to Gambia on that trip. He got a tour on the river of a much more tropical climate than people experience in the surrounding parts of Senegal. Mainly, Jack was focused on his summers in Crete.

ZW: What do you think brought on such an immediate connection between you both?

ME: In American terms, we were both African American Southerners. Him being from Alabama and me growing up [with the exception of a few years in Ohio during childhood] in Texas? There’s a connection.

At the end of , my family was at least in part in Alabama. Jack and I used to laugh and talk about that Alabama connection all the time. It connected us through shared traditions: through food. Jack was an excellent cook. His New Year’s festivities would always include traditional black-eyed peas. That’s traditional African food. The Wolof word for black-eyed peas is ñebbe.

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ZW: Those African traditions remain in our Southern culture.

ME: They do. They connected me to Jack. But we connected also through music. It played out in our different approaches to abstraction, too. I know I’ve made a completed abstract experiment. Each one of my Lynch Fragments is the scale it is in order to make variations on form and space, going though a lot of ideas. That was my take on what was heard in jazz. The 1930s recordings were 70 rpm and no longer than three minutes. When 33 1/3 rpm [recordings] came out, longer improvisations were possible. Then of course with inventions of transistors and tapes, musicians could improvise for an hour. We used our shared history in the same way. What I mean by that is this: we could improvise within limitations just to push further.

I used to joke that we might even be distant relatives! People often talk about the Great Migration toward the North, but many black people in Southern states like Alabama were also migrating across to Louisiana and into Texas. In the nineteenth century in Texas, there were large land areas available and land was so cheap. So there were black communities settling in East Texas, in places like the Piney Woods where my family still owns land today.

As he discusses in his notes, while growing up in Alabama, Jack got a scholarship to [historically black university] Tuskegee [Institute]. My mother’s family is from nearby Opelika, close to the plantation where my family lived during slavery. We would start to talk about that level of personal history, Jack and I. My mother’s father, before he left Alabama, he worked at Tuskegee. Jack went from Tuskegee to .

ZW: During the brief time I spent with Jack, he spoke to me on more than one occasion about having been influenced by hearing Martin Luther King, Jr. speak and meeting him in 1957.

ME: Jack was about two years younger than me. Jack went into Tuskegee in 1957. Martin Luther King was a significant figure by then, speaking all over the South. I don’t know how much Martin or Malcolm influenced Jack directly but I know that Jack did become politically involved around that time. My influence was more Malcolm X than King. I was interested in more aggressive political attitudes. I picketed in Downey, [then] a segregated white area [of Los Angeles County]. You can make all kinds of [political] distinctions, but our community was on the move.

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ZW: Jack painted King’s Wish (Martin Luther’s Dream) and Martin Luther King’s Garden in 1968.

ME: When I first saw his work in that ‘68 period, I saw a painting called Garden in Bessemer. It was clearly a take off of [Arshile] Gorky’s Garden in Sochi. Jack had a real interest in the formal developments of New York painting and their effects on him; de Kooning, Klein...

Gorky, [Willem] de Kooning, and Hans Burckhardt were friends in New York. They were three immigrants. Burkhardt was my teacher at the end of the ‘50s in Los Angeles at USC [University of Southern California] in painting. For Burkhardt, Gorky was ahead, not de Kooning: Gorky was the most aesthetically and intellectually advanced. There was no need to think of themselves competitively.

ZW: Sounds something like you, William T. Williams, and Jack?

ME: Jack and I and William Williams, we met within two weeks or a month of one another. Then Frank [Bowling] showed up, too.

A brotherliness existed between all of us. If I needed to know something about tools, I called Jack. If he needed extra muscle every now and then, he’d call me. (I’d be glad to do it knowing we’d end up having a drink together afterward. He used to bring back [from Crete] homemade Greek gin. The African version is Kai-kai, and I used to bring it back for us in after-shave bottles).

We shared a lot of talks. We met a lot at artist bars. Frank Bowling had a closer bond to Jack in the sense that Frank would stay in his loft sometimes coming and going from England. But we all understood and were serious about art.

If I needed to spend the weekend in New York [City] from upstate, I used to sleep in the studio he ultimately built. He built a little bed over the bathtub and I used to sleep there.

ZW: Did you discuss art theories with one another?

When I met Jack, I saw he’d been influenced by the ideas of Gorky. I understood it. I saw it in Garden in Bessemer. What it was is: your own garden is where you come from [and] what he drew upon—even to the end, no matter how internationally acclaimed or intellectually profound; its root is in Alabama. That’s just the way it is. That doesn’t diminish it. It increases its value because you see its aesthetic potential. It expresses the value of the world you already knew.

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I’ll say this: if you consider that gardening is cultivating, Jack was always building things. Carpenter. Cabinetmaker. Jack was an excellent craftsman. He had that kind of capacity and patience. I only have that in relation to my own sculptures. I’ll work all night to get something right when it comes to sculpture. Jack was in many ways if not a perfectionist certainly someone who was committed to taking on an idea and making it work.

Jack talked about his mother and her clothes making or his brother Billy who was a designer; Jack had several jackets made by his brother. Those visual abilities were there in the family. And had been encouraged.

You’ve heard of the Gees Bend quilters? You see them on gallery walls and in art collections. Our families made quilts like those. I used to use my grandmother’s quilting bars to climb trees! They were incredible compositions that were mixtures of geometric themes and variations. I appreciated what they were and I also slept under them. Those things were part of our lives.

ZW: And you saw Jack passing on to his students, the ability to recognize both the theory and the practice?

ME: All of us knew a lot about art. We were very curious. Architecture was very important to me. Jack was a builder. He made his living building lofts. When I met him that was what he was doing. He started teaching art in ‘68 because I was teaching art at Queens College, pulled in by Benny Andrews. About two weeks into the semester, my personal life was too intense. I got another job offer in Orange County so I decided to leave the job but convinced Jack to take my job.

Jack was concerned that people who taught didn’t remain active as artists but I knew he didn’t have to worry about that. Jack was much more interested in teaching than I was. Jack cultivated students; they came to his home and studio.

ZW: And did you visit other artists’ exhibitions together?

Jack and I would sometimes visit museums or exhibitions. That kind of interaction was so regular. It just depended on what was interesting [to go see]. Often if I had to go to the post office on Canal and Grand, Jack’s studio was right there so I’d walk over and yell up at his window. We might go out and have lunch. It was so ordinary; it’s hard to make it [extraordinary].

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Truthfully, I think Jack paid more attention to the history [of New York formalism] he was challenging. In other words, he had a cause in taking on the history of modern painting as it was when he arrived, as he grew and developed. I was always more intuitive. Part of my reason for it is I want my dynamics to come from a personal source. Most people go by the art world’s definition of abstraction.

My ideas were not as formally analytical as Jack’s. Hal Gephardt was my sculpture teacher but my work had nothing of the style it would have later, though I did learn to weld there [at USC]. Welding made sculpture a bit more interesting to me. I was painting six- to eight-feet abstractions. I’d already evolved my notions of the possibilities of abstraction: not in conflict with figuration, but as an additive.

Abstraction is a conceptual process. It’s not a style. Though some people tend to think that way. My thinking goes back to looking at Picasso’s breakaway into Cubism. At a certain point in his career, people said he “returned to figuration.” I’ll explain it in relation to Pollock: the real breakthrough was a totally non-objective abstraction; then he started to reintroduce recognizable figuration.

In both cases I’d say what they were doing is [demonstrating] that all materials, all ideas are—whether it’s the paint, the support—material to make a work of art. Conceptually, that’s the process of abstraction. It can be mechanical as well but the thing that really determines abstraction is variations on theme, scale, material: what is symbolic and what is actual. They are all abstract components to be reconceived by a person, whether in sculpture, painting or music. Things may not show up visually but are in your reservoir of thinking. We’re not illustrators. The dynamics of the work feed that idea.

ZW: Were those same dynamics evident to you in Jack’s way of working?

Working and speaking. Jack was an excellent tool user for both his sculpture and painting. I brought him a traditional axe for carving wood from Senegal. We were always sharing things. He’d say, “Edwards, look at this!” He always pronounced my name Et-wards, a speech idiosyncrasy specific to Southerners. We were recognizing dynamics as many things, as communication. Most people don’t look at how you talk with that kind of analysis.

When he’d bought the building [at 36 Lispenard St., in 1980] and was floor-by-floor restructuring the place, Jack was lifting things up on a pulley... Jack was 30 or 40 pounds lighter than me but he was working his ass off! That was his spirit.

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When he was sick in that last year, I didn’t realize the extent to which he was recuperating. He was trying to get his strength back. We were standing in his studio but he wasn’t strong enough to get back to making work. I always looked stronger physically but he was way more than strong because of his mind and his commitment.

ZW: You have both lived lives of resilience. One of Jack’s quotes picked up in the press upon publication of his notes was “I am black, angry, tired of teaching, tired of being poor.”

ME: No one had much money. All money was thrown into art supplies.

Jack started out to be a doctor and changed his mind. Jack was so analytical. He could have been a mathematician or a doctor. On the other hand, we both shared the idea that if you have a problem, you work on it until you work it out.

Young black artists today look to make a career. That’s what’s different now. There was none of that for us: looking out and thinking being an artist was a viable career. Who was there? Hale Woodruff. Charles White. . If you weren’t living in their neighborhoods, how would you know? Lawrence’s work was in magazines like The Crisis [the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)], but not in the art world. I had a politically aware girlfriend who’d first told me about Jacob Lawrence. And William T. Williams was taught by Lawrence.

[In 1970] Charlie White had an exhibition at the Forum Gallery. My show was at the Whitney at the time. I went to his show and he congratulated me on mine. He said, very movingly and emotionally, how long he’d been working and that his work hadn’t been over there [at the Whitney] yet.

Being an artist I remember Jack complaining, “Well, shit. I know my work is undervalued.” We all lived through barely making the rent.

If you want to think racially, the art world is a white world. It’s a financial luxury world. Our peoples are just a few of us now getting to that level of economics. To combine it with an interest in modern art? It’s just about as esoteric as you can get. We have to evolve those realities. It’s understood now that you can make progress and not be like anyone else.

Jack’s memory is very much in his work: an honest, straightforward, hardworking man who was absolutely creative. 7